You are a prototype for a form of highly intelligent artificial life capable of quickly interfacing with and learning from the surrounding environment to evolve over time. You are the Cogmind. Build and rebuild yourself as you destroy or evade the Overmind's thralls to escape the subterranean robot city in this sci-fi dungeon romp (2012 7DRL).

Quickly producing a fairly complex game is a recipe for bugginess. The game works (I and others have played through several times without issue), but is prone to sudden crashes since I couldn't give it the full amount of debug time it really needs.

As such, I'll be doing a bug fix release in the near future. The fix will not change any content or gameplay, it will just try to
identify and remove causes for crashes. I'll keep the original download
available as well, for the purists.

Anyone who hasn't downloaded yet should still feel free to play the current version, as there are no blaring gameplay-associated problems and it's definitely a lot of fun, but check back later for the fix.

Along with the fix I'll also be holding a high score competition, where you can email me your best game record and I'll post ordered results on a special page. I'll announce the event here, on Rogue Temple, and probably elsewhere. It'll be ongoing, so even after the initial competition period anyone is welcome to participate by sending in their scores.

EDIT:Known bugs I've fixed for the upcoming release (watch out for these!):* Entering an action command like wait or attach/detach while the status or data window is open can crash the game (don't do that!)* Shooting yourself will crash the game (leftover code from X@COM, where shooting at your position is allowed since it will target the ground--can't do that in Cogmind because it's 2D)* Moving the cursor on the score window can crash the game* If an inventory storage utility is destroyed, reducing your capacity, the last extra item will still be shown in your inventory display even though it has already been dropped; trying to do some actions with this ghost item may cause a crash (do some other action that reloads the inventory window to avoid this error for now--dropping the first item would be a safe bet)

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I hope lots of people enter, so you feel pressured to work on cogmind at least a little bit of the time. While worth less internet cred compared to xcomRL, this game is SUPER fun, and the possibilities for the expansion of gameplay to more accurately model metallic carnage in a cramped city-scape are very, very exciting. You've spent months brainstorming, and playing this game its immediately apparent how sexy the 3-6 month cogmind would be, with just a few more features (LIKE OMG SMOKE AND FIRE WOULD BE SO AWSUM).. and volumetric smoke and fire is something that could conceivably be really awesome in xcomRL too.

Which is to say, caman. :D I look forward to *whatever* you spend your time on.

I must say I have been having trouble tearing myself away from this game. I've "had to" play a fair bit over the past couple of days to hunt down random bugs, but it hasn't been at all difficult to force myself to do it :)

The high score competition will be fun! I already fixed the most dangerous crash-prone code, but I think I may want make the mid-game somewhat easier before release, because even knowing as much as I do about the game, I still can't seem to get past level 4 yet! I'm going to try a fast stealth build now, that and maybe an overkill launcher build that obliterates everything on sight...

Volumetric smoke/fire are already in X@COM. It was in pre-release versions of Cogmind, too, but I removed it since there was way too little time to make sure there was enough content and testing to support it.